A Swedish photography magazine was recently contacted by lawyers who claimed that a photo it downloaded from the free photo service Pixabay violated a client’s copyright. But it turned out the law firm and the client were both fake, and the real photographer had never uploaded it to Pixabay either.
After it was approached by lawyers that claimed to represent the owners of a photo it had downloaded from Pixabay, Kamera & Bild decided to do a bit of digging. What it discovered was a trail of fake identities and websites. The result is a convoluted tale of how the commonplace occurrence of stolen imagery is being turned into a strange new online scam that isn’t even looking to steal money, but online clout.
A Stolen Photo
The photo in question depicts a surfer on a beach in Biarritz, France. It was originally captured by photographer Zak Suhar and was shared on his Instagram in June of 2016. But Suhar never uploaded it to Pixabay; that was done by a company called Stocksnap.
Suhar believes that the photo was posted on Snapwire — a site where photographers can upload and sell their photos — years ago and from that point was repeatedly downloaded and re-uploaded across multiple platforms, all without his permission.
“In a perfect world, I really want to get paid for the use of all my photos,” he tells Kamera & Bild. “It is a tough battle between the value of exposure versus monetary value. In the age of social media, it’s tough when photos are stolen all the time.”
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Read Full Story: https://petapixel.com/2022/04/28/false-claims-to-stolen-free-photos-may-be-a-strange-new-online-scam/
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